NY Times: “Last year, a Delaware court dismissed Chemours’s lawsuit against DuPont. Months later, in January 2021, DuPont, Chemours and Corteva agreed to split the costs of future litigation and cleanups related to PFAS pollution that occurred before 2015.
The chief executives of the three companies issued a joint statement: “The agreement will provide a measure of security and certainty for each company and our respective shareholders.”
The same couldn’t be said for the communities affected by the pollution.
In 2019, Mr. Regan, then the head of the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, signed an order that required Fayetteville Works to drastically reduce the amount of PFAS and GenX it was releasing into the ground, air and water. Mr. Regan, now the E.P.A. administrator, required Chemours to install new filtration systems and to provide thousands of nearby residents with bottled water or filters for their faucets.
Yet despite the upgraded plant and new technologies at Fayetteville Works, Chemours remains unable to stop the pollution. Short of halting the production of PFAS, it’s unclear what a system to completely stop the discharge of chemicals — not to mention to clean up the existing contamination — would even look like.
Last fall, the state’s attorney general, Josh Stein, sued Chemours and DuPont, accusing the companies of polluting the state with chemicals they knew were dangerous and of deploying a “fraudulent scheme” — a “shell game” — to shirk accountability.
“DuPont attempted to dump its liabilities on Chemours, just as it dumped GenX and other forever chemicals into the Cape Fear River,” Mr. Stein said in an interview.
The lawsuit seeks to void the spinoff of Chemours and make the companies pay to clean up the pollution.
In response to the suit, Chemours argued that the statute of limitations had expired and that the company had no duty to warn the government or the public about the release of PFAS. DuPont argued that Chemours — “an entirely different company” — had taken on all PFAS-related costs and that DuPont didn’t exist in its current state until after 2015.
While that suit and others brought by residents, utilities and municipalities wind through the court system, Fayetteville residents are living in fear. (The companies declined to comment on allegations from people who believe they were harmed by the chemicals.)
Carrol Olinger, a retired teacher, will no longer drink water from her faucet, which she blames for the autoimmune disease that has forced her to rely on a walker. Janice Burton, who works at the U.S. Army’s nearby Fort Bragg base, spent $30,000 installing a swimming pool that she won’t enter for fear of being poisoned.”